I really like the clear styling of checkboxes and radio buttons in the GDS pattern library. Fitts’s law in action.
Following on from that excellent blog post about removing jQuery from gov.uk, here are the performance improvements in charts and numbers.
It may sound like 32 kb of JavaScript is nothing on today’s modern web with quick devices and fast broadband connections. But for a certain cohort of users, it makes a big difference to how they experience GOV.UK.
This is a great thorough description of the process of migrating gov.uk away from jQuery. It sounds like this guide was instrumental in the process—I love that they’re sharing it openly!
Removing jQuery means that 32Kb of JavaScript has been removed from the majority of pages on GOV.UK. GOV.UK is already quite fast to load and for many users this will make no noticeable difference. However, the change for users on a low bandwidth connection or lower specification device will be much more noticeable, resulting in significantly improved page download speed and performance.
This is a really good description of the role of a front-end developer.
That’s front end, not full stack.
Alice Bartlett shares her experience of getting aria-live regions to work in a meaningful way.
A look behind the scenes of gov.uk. I like their attitude to Photoshop comps:
We don’t want a culture of designs being “thrown over a wall” to a dev team. We don’t make “high fidelity mock ups” or “high fidelity wireframes”. We’re making a Thing, not pictures of a Thing.
And UX:
We don’t have a UX Team. If the problem with your service is that the servers are slow and the UX Team can’t change that, then they aren’t in control of the user experience and they shouldn’t be called the user experience team.
Some buggy behaviour has been fixed in iOS 18 but now there’s a new bit of weirdness.
A little fix for Safari.
Better UX through better HTML: inputmode, enterkeyhint, and autocomplete.
It’s not just about finding the issues—it’s about finding the issues at the right time.
Some ways of combining security and usability for two-factor authentication on the web.